What the man running the City of London Law Society thinks the City is actually selling, and what 60 firms and nearly £2m have already shown it can do about who gets in.
Patrick McCann remembers two rooms, a month apart, at one of the law firms he worked for. The first was the Global Trainee Induction. “The population there was a real microcosm of the jurisdictions in which we worked,” he says. “Talented, diverse, eager, ambitious. Most communities seemed to be represented.” The second was the Global Partners’ Meeting. “The look and feel of that was very different, significantly so, and that gave me pause. Something was changing between entry and partnership. I was concerned.”
The gap between those two rooms is one the profession’s regulator now measures. In the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s latest workforce diversity data, published in March 2026, 23% of partners attended a fee-paying school against 18% of solicitors, and solicitors from a lower socio-economic background outnumber partners from one, 18% to 15%. Firm size widens it: 63% of lawyers in firms with 50 or more partners are from a professional background, against 54% in one-partner firms. Set against the country as a whole the gap is wider still: the Department for Education’s January 2026 school census counts 6.3% of pupils in England in independent schools.
Patrick is the Chief Executive of the City of London Law Society, working, as he puts it on his profile, “with member firms and stakeholders to protect, promote, and future-proof the sector.” He’s also Co-CEO of City Century, a collaboration of City law firms that recruits solicitor apprentices into London, and a co-founder of the Social Welfare Solicitors’ Qualification Fund, which pays for legal aid lawyers to qualify as solicitors. Three roles, and one argument running through all of them: that who gets into City law, and how the City is seen to behave, is one of the things the City is selling.
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What the City is selling
His profile puts the problem in one line: “The City legal sector has a resilience challenge: governance, talent pipelines, and public trust are all under pressure.” Asked for his answer, he starts with access.
We have to reach out and help all members of society access the City legal profession, in all senses, and ensure that we are seen to work responsibly.
Patrick McCann, Chief Executive, City of London Law Society
Responsibly, in his list, means “with ambition but also compassion, ethics, innovation, the rule of law.” He puts it as a selling point. “That is one of our main selling points, why people want to work within the framework of English law. We have the most talented people and a legal system that delivers both change but also constancy.”
He’s just as plain about the distance between the reputation and the practice. “Our reputation might not be entirely accurate in relation to that, or maybe it is. Our practice, and our PR, needs support. The answer, I think, is to keep at the forefront of our minds the reputation we want City Law to have, and then act accordingly.”
The thing whose reputation he’s guarding is not small. TheCityUK’s UK legal services 2025 report puts the sector’s contribution to the UK economy at a record £38bn in 2024. Patrick’s own version is “tens of billions to the UK economy, more than ever.” The pressure, he says, is just as easy to see.
Nearly £2m and over 200 apprentices
“The evidence of the pressure can be easily seen,” he says: “career application rates, SQE pass rates, profits being made, people retention, findings by regulators and the like.” On the exam, the numbers back him. In the January 2026 sitting of SQE1, the first stage of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination, the overall pass rate was 53% across 7,863 candidates.
He writes about the SQE more than most legal sector chief executives would. He’s posted booking alerts for candidates, welcomed the SRA’s changes for January 2027 (fewer questions, subjects divided between the two sessions) and then asked for more: letting candidates bank FLK1 and FLK2 separately, research into how neurodivergent candidates fare, and the right to drink water without losing assessment time. His summary of what the exam should be runs to three words: “Hard. Not harrowing.”
Against the pressure he sets the work. “There is some great work being done,” he says. “City Law has, through the Social Welfare Solicitors’ Qualification Fund, raised nearly £2m to date to allow legal aid lawyers to solicitor-qualify. City Century has worked with over 60 City firms who between them bring over 200 solicitor apprentices each year, the majority from underrepresented communities, into Big City Law. The pro bono work City practices do is breathtaking.” His profile adds a figure for the fund: more than 170 legal aid lawyers supported to qualify (55 already have).
Running several things at once is, by his own account, how he has always worked.
One job was never enough
“One job’s never been enough for me,” he wrote this month. He read law at King’s College London, with a Diploma in German Law, then took the Law Society Finals. As a junior lawyer he put in “20 hours a week pro bono” for the Terrence Higgins Trust, at the time an HIV and AIDS charity, on a legal helpline, litigating for the organisation and “representing its clients in the most harrowing phases of their lives. And deaths.”
There was a spell as a conference producer, and alongside it he started teaching fitness classes. He went back into law firms through learning and development, co-running a graduate recruitment scheme while still teaching, and for five years leading a 50-strong dance troupe on the London and Brighton Pride marches. At the next firm he ran the learning team and its international lawyer exchanges, and vice-chaired a sector-wide learning group. At the one after that he sat on leadership teams and set up a 20-firm queer recruitment initiative.
His profile lists five major international law firms in all. The last was Linklaters, where he was Global Head of Learning from 2016 and Director of Learning from 2021 to January 2025, co-leading a team of more than 150 across learning and knowledge. In the same years he chaired the City of London Law Society’s Training Committee, having sat on it since 2010, established two legal industry queer initiatives, set up the fund for legal aid lawyers, and co-created the 60-firm social mobility initiative that became City Century. In 2024 he was named UK Social Mobility Awards’ Champion of the Year. In September 2025 he took the chief executive’s seat at the Law Society he had served as a committee member for fifteen years.
He names one hard moment along the way, and keeps it short. “Burning out, completely, at one firm. It took a while to recover from that. I still need to watch that even today.”
He also names one person. Justin d’Agostino, Global CEO at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, “an out gay man demonstrating authenticity and excellence. What an inspiration.”
For me, it was about how Justin made everyone feel special. He brought ambition, fun, care, irreverence, intelligence.
Patrick, Chief Executive, City of London Law Society
The same mix shows up in how he runs things himself.
Ambulance or ice-cream van
Patrick has a large LinkedIn following and uses it to think out loud, mostly in lists. One recent post proposes a new word, “nurgent”, for tasks that are not urgent yet, and offers a test for the ones that arrive marked urgent anyway: “is the task an ambulance or actually an ice-cream van?” Both, he writes, come with noise and light. “But only one is really important in that moment.”
On negotiation, from “40 years in and around City Law”, his first move is to work out what the other side might want and sort it on two axes, value to them and cost to you, then “ask lots of questions. Often the position someone starts with isn’t what they actually need.” His bonus point: “Be nice to deal with.”
On asking for feedback, his closing advice is to “look for patterns, not opinions. One person says it, meh. Three people say it? That’s your reputation.” And to the Gen Z lawyers he writes for as often as the Gen X ones: “Silence is ungolden.” He signs his profile with a line that covers all of it: “I have things to say. Views expressed very much my own.”
Where Patrick Is Now
In September 2026 the City of London Law Society held its London Law Imperative conference, which Patrick conceptualised with Colin Passmore KC (Hon) and Carly Hollingsworth. It brought senior leaders from the Society’s over 70 member firms together with stakeholders from across the UK legal ecosystem, and the Minister for Courts and Legal Services, Sarah Sackman KC MP, gave the keynote. The agenda, in his words, covered “City business, law firm business models, private equity, AI, people, careers, authenticity, responsibilities, government.” His verdict: “We are talking. There is more to come.”
City Century is heading into its fifth year, and its 2026 awards have a new category, Supervisor of the Year, for “someone who helps turn an apprentice into a solicitor.”
What he wants from the next twelve months is for people in and around City law to know “what we do, who we are, what we stand for, what we get done and will get done.” He wants “anyone with talent and tenacity” to feel that a career in City law is open to them, member firms to run “profitable and responsible businesses” that can compete on the world stage, and the Society to “influence government and business practice.” The reader he has in mind is not one person. “From those driving the profession, to those challenging and collaborating with it, to those in it and those seeking to enter it,” he says. “I’m called #ChattyPatty for a reason.”
Outside work: “I have two brilliant dogs and one amazing husband and a bunch of lifetime friends who are absolute scoundrels, and I love them for it. They love me but have absolutely no respect for the job I have or the work I do. Hurrah. Keeping grounded is critical.”
He has a hashtag for the line he lives by, #HappenIt, and a longer version for anyone who asks. “If you can see it, go make it happen. Work hard, don’t be hard. Keep going, maybe do most of it yourself but Get. It. Done.”
Five Lines from Patrick’s Diary
- Work hard, don’t be hard.
- Hard. Not harrowing.
- Silence is ungolden.
- Look for patterns, not opinions.
- Keeping grounded is critical.
From the Diary of Patrick McCann
Patrick McCann is a London-based legal sector leader and the Chief Executive of the City of London Law Society.
| Role | Chief Executive, City of London Law Society; Co-CEO, City Century; Co-founder, Social Welfare Solicitors’ Qualification Fund |
| Based in | London, United Kingdom |
| Previously with | Linklaters (2016 to 2025) |
| Also with | City Century |
“Work hard, don’t be hard.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary chose Patrick McCann because he runs the body that speaks for the City of London’s law firms and, at the same time, two of the programmes changing who enters the profession. The editors were persuaded by the two rooms he describes, a trainee induction and a partners’ meeting a month apart, and by the fact that his answer to the gap between them is a fund with nearly £2m in it and a collaboration of more than 60 firms. He writes in short lines. Executives Diary, Editorial.
